“The fruit kind. Like when Honey makes it and it’s set, but not all the way and it wobbles when you touch the—”
He went down.
Not a stumble this time. A full stop. His legs simply opted out of the enterprise, folding under him like furniture that had quietly decided to become something other than furniture. Riot caught him before he fully hit the dirty water and held him.
“Oh,” Cass said, blinking at the ceiling.
“I’m going to carry you now.” Riot placed an arm under Cass’s knees.
“...okay.”
Riot picked him up. The weight of him was nothing; even without the Berserker modifications, carrying Cassshouldhave been nothing. Three hundred pounds of wet concrete would also have been nothing. But the man in his arms felt heavier than physics accounted for, because Riot was carrying everything Cass had ever survived and none of it weighed what it should.
Behind them, there was the sound again. Closer. Voices, maybe. The acoustic distortion of the tunnel turned it into something unrecognizable—it could have been two people, or ten. It could have been the safety guides that Brother Rath definitely radioed after watching a gold-eyed Berserker “escort” a drugged Omega past the meditation hall under the supervision of an Elder who looked like he’d been mauled.
Because of course Rath wasn’t fooled. Nobody who looked at that tableau and had a functioning brain stem would have been fooled. Subtle, this operation is not.
“Left here,” Matthias said.
They went left and the tunnel narrowed enough that both of Riot’s shoulders brushed the walls and he hunched further. He curled around Cass, making himself smaller—which was not a thing his body was designed to do and his spine was going to have opinions about later.
Dead end.
The tunnel terminated in a concrete wall. Pipes. A junction box. No door. No hatch. Nothing.
“You said left,” Riot growled, feeling that familiar twitch in his muscles to do something about his growing rage.
“I—the layout may have changed since—”
“The layout may have—” Riot glared at him. The gold reflected off the wet walls and Matthias’s face went white in its light. “You’re navigating frommemory?”
“The maintenance infrastructure isn’t something I use regularly—”
“We trusted you to lead us out and you’re guessing?”
“I’m notguessing,I’m reconstructing based on architectural records I reviewed—”
“Honey.” Riot’s voice was controlled the way a leash was controlled—holding something back, purpose-built. “Is there another way?”
Honey was staring at the dead end, her hand on her hip. “The junction. Fifty meters back. There was a branch we passed—I saw a smaller passage. It might loop to the east trunk.”
There were still sounds behind them, even closer and unmistakably voices now. Echoing, multiplied by the concrete, and impossible to count.
“Then we go back.” Riot nodded.
They went back. The fifty meters felt like five hundred. The water splashing with each step, the tunnel amplifying the sound, announcing their position to anyone listening. Riot’s gold was doing the thing where it tracked everything—the tunnel behind, the tunnel ahead, the man in front of him, the princess in his arms, the voices getting closer, the math of how fast sound traveled through concrete versus how fast people traveled through water.
The secondary passage was there. Smaller. Darker. No bulbs.
“This way,” Honey said, and went in first, which was either brave or desperate, and at this point the distinction was academic.
The darkness would have been complete if not for the glow of Riot’s eyes, and he did his best to keep them focused ahead of them and not constantly scanning so they would know where they were going. What kind of military tech did Elysian Dynamics run on their campuses? The disguised communication pins were already impressive. Did they carry guns? Stun weapons? Riot had no idea. He really should have asked Dante for more details….
“...you smell really good,” Cass said into his neck.
Riot adjusted his grip and kept moving. “Thank you.”
“Even the cordite part. It smells good because it comes with you.” A pause.Splash, splashfrom Riot’s feet. “I feel sick.”
